Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

I checked our plants. The water line was functioning. The ground at their feet was wet. They opened their leafy arms, as a grade-school rhyme once had it, to pray. Not twenty feet distant, buzzards balanced in the thermal currents. Nothing to it, step outward in faith and tread the air.

In my dreams of flying, the power of flight emanates from my heart.

I had many such dreams last year, while touring Italy. Even when awake, I felt much lighter than that world over there — Europe is ancient, the culture has tremendous mass. Milan: greatness and sunlight and the wild eyebrows of the citizenry…I was travelling with Winona; important to remember this now, with Melissa hover-Already Dead / 31

ing like an angel above me on the ridge, out of sight…Winona and I walked into the massive duomo there, a church as tall as a modern skyscraper but centuries old and only a single vaulting story within.

Inside it I felt smaller than ever, farther than ever from heaven. The upper reaches lost themselves in a haze of incense. Looking up I relin-quished my lightness, was suddenly plunging, drowning with the iron freight of desires, frustrations, selfish hopes. Oh, holy atmosphere, marbled with sweet smoke: with how much yearning are we gifted?

Of how much capable? The church’s dome was as deep as a California canyon. These buzzards hanging in the air, one wingbeat beyond the lip of Signal Ridge, would have been at home there; in fact I believe I felt their presence or that of something like them, sensed observant birds of prey balanced high up in the gigantic dimness.

The faith is gone from those places, the heart-power of flight, this I believe. But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing — come to California.

I didn’t get out to the garden often, but my growing-partner, Clarence, was down in Los Angeles that month, if I remember right, robbing poker games or attending a transvestite wedding, nothing, certainly, that wasn’t completely unholy. During his absence I looked in on our investment every two or three days, making sure the water flowed. Right now I stood on the cliff with my head poking up from our little jungle. I trimmed the plants, putting their dead leaves in my shirt pocket. Stroked the jagged fingers of their little hands. The upper leaves felt not just sticky but slaked with a substance entirely other, not earthly, not mine, as if my mother would snatch at my hand now saying,

“Don’t touch that!” Almost all twenty-seven were doing nicely, all but one. Transplanting sprouts in the spring, nervous about it because we hadn’t been to this place for months and it had seemed foreign and dangerous, fated, even, I’d jayed the roots of this one, bent them upward; it had never recovered. I yanked it, and now we had twenty-six. Each one of these things might be worth seven thousand dollars or more.

My partner, Clarence, is a surfer. He does everything with a vacant look. Between harvest and planting, after he’s sold the dope in L.A., he travels all over the Western Hemisphere, walking the waves of the 32 / Denis Johnson

world with a big foot of fiberglass. He glides in toward the beaches of Nicaragua, of El Salvador, without a clue. The Left, the Right, class struggle, agrarian revolt — Clarence just wants to feel the softness of the sand. When he comes back from these winter trips Clarence looks un-characteristically alive, so darkly tanned that his eyes seem to glow in his face with the mania of sainthood.

Clarence is a dozen years older than the local surfers, but out of perverseness he speaks the surfers’ dialect. “I could heard that, dude,” he says, and other such unsearchable stuff.

Usually, according to our arrangement, Clarence is the one to stay near the plants. I supervise things, I will take care of any legal problems, I make the contacts for sale down south, I handle all the money; and I can be trusted because if I let him down, if I rip him off, he’ll hurt me.

Clarence was a gunner’s mate in the U.S. Navy and somehow managed to see ground combat in Lebanon. He actually killed people up close, and got medals for it.

At the time I’m thinking of I often wished I could hire him to get rid of my former friend Harry Lally. Terminate, assassinate the guy. But that was a plan with too many indicators pointing back to me.

For Winona I dreamed of a job-related mishap. She used a chainsaw after all. It wasn’t a plan so much as a vision, a guilty one, but one that I enjoyed, that thrilled me as much as fantasies of pirate ships and Peter Pan had thrilled me as a child: Winona lying beside a patch of shiny red grass with something, an arm or an ankle, unfortunately detached.

Tough luck! — but now my life is cured. Melissa and I hide from our consciences awhile, pouring insurance money — half a million on Winona’s life, just as on mine — down our gullets and into the tanks of my fast cars, and then we live out our days on my splendid property, growing pot in these hills and waiting to inherit my father’s timber.

Half a million! In this fantasy I don’t have to kill Harry Lally. I just scrape a hundred thousand off my stack and he goes away happy.

Harry Lally wants money from me and would certainly hire people to get it. I believe in fact that they’re already in his employ and closing fast, two of them, two ugly men who claim to be loggers from Del Norte County and have asked about me, by name, in Jay Haymaker’s hardware store, two slow, muscular, flannel-encrusted mountain men. Here to hunt the wild pig, they explain — that’s why they travel with an arsenal and three dogs. They claim to be old

Already Dead / 33

friends of mine. They’d like, they say, chuckling in the hardware store beside Jay Haymaker’s antique daguerreotype of five gunslingers hanging dead from the rafters of a barn (underneath his sign reading OUR CREDIT POLICY), to take me up into the hills with them. I don’t want to go!

I inhaled the sharp green stench of the shoot I’d plucked. The crop was quality. If everything continued like this, Clarence and I would soon be rich. The hills before me loped inland to where Italian families still grow grapes and crush out wine. I could see, all the way from here, the vapors of life swirling over the Sonoma vineyards where my grandmother had been raised. A place very much like the Sicilian hills overlooking Palermo, and the inland wine country of her father’s birth.

I took Harry Lally’s money to Palermo. Gave it to a solemn Italian attorney wearing heavy black spectacles and beset by a general heavi-ness, which I took to be the great weight of his personal wealth; and as I added to his riches by about a hundred thousand of Harry Lally’s dollars, this attorney gave me a satchel with four kilos of cocaine inside it. Then we had prosciutto ham with honeydew melon, spaghetti, sturgeon, and coffee, which we served ourselves from large metal urns with spigots as in any Tenderloin cafeteria, and hot milk from similar urns. I stuffed myself. All was well, we were devouring this lunch downstairs at the Palme Grande, where Winona and I had taken rooms and in whose mezzanine the Mafia had slaughtered several of each other a few years before, toppling corpses down the wide sweeping staircase. I sensed the mighty stones of a traditional lawlessness, ancient, impenetrable, walling me safely in.

But two days later, at the airport in Rome, I sensed no such thing. I felt empty, I felt alone, and I chickened out. No airport guard, no travel clerk, no janitor, waitress, or ticket-taker seemed incidentally placed.

They were all after me, scratching at their guns. All right! Shoot! Shoot!

But for God’s sake don’t embarrass me in front of my wife, don’t expose me, don’t chisel open the crust I’ve built around myself and air the filth, the nauseating truth, beneath. Winona didn’t tumble. Never had a clue, didn’t turn and say, as in her favorite films, Hitchcock — I don’t like them, everybody’s too happy and ordinary, James Stewart, Cary Grant, I only like Notorious , and then only until we find out Ingrid Bergman isn’t really bad — say, “Darling, you’re trembling, what’s the matter?” as my liver went sinking down through the mush of me.